The interim director of the state department of public health says her agency will not endorse the report of a specially appointed Lyme disease commission, particularly parts that call for expansi...

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The interim director of the state department of public health says her agency will not endorse the report of a specially appointed Lyme disease commission, particularly parts that call for expansion of research funding and that address chronic lyme.

In a letter To state Rep. David P. Linsky (d-natick), chairman of the commission, Dr. Lauren A. Smith said that while the DPH "supports and celebrates the majority of this report," current budget constraints prevent the DPH from advocating for increased funding.

Smith also said that the DPH cannot recommend including a variety of chronic lyme disease clinical viewpoints, mentioning a recent new england journal of medicine report questioning treatments for chronic lyme.

state sen. dan wolf (d-harwich) co-sponsored the bill establishing the commission and is one of several cape commission members. wolf's senior advisor, seth rolbein, said the Lyme commission is scheduled to reconvene Jan. 29 to see if it can hash out differences with the Dph.

"We're hopeful the report is going to be released" soon after the meeting, rolbein said.

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Yale scientists report that at least one person from Nantucket has been infected with a tick-borne disease so new it doesn't have a name.

In today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Yale Schools of Public Health and Medicine say they have discovered evidence of the disease in 18 patients in southern New England and New York.

At least one of the patients was from Nantucket, Dr. Peter Krause, senior research scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said.

This is the first time an infection in humans from a bacterium known as Borrelia miyamotoi has been confirmed in the United States, Yale officials said.

The disease is transmitted by the deer tick, the same hard-bodied anthropod that infects humans with Lyme disease, babesiosis and anaplasmosis.

It combines symptoms similar to Lyme with those typically associated with relapsing fever carried by soft-bodied ticks in the Western states, Krause said.

"Just about all (patients) had fever and most had accompanying symptoms of headache, muscle ache and fatigue," he said. Blood tests confirmed the presence of infection.

The first evidence of human infection was found in 46 Russian patients in a study published by Russian and Yale scientists in 2011, Krause said.

About 10 to 15 percent of the Russian and American patients also had a small, red rash less than 2½ inches in diameter, he said.

The new infection is treated with the same antibiotics used to treat Lyme, which are doxycycline and amoxycillin, Krause said.

The emergence of the new disease could hold clues to why some patients with Lyme-like symptoms test negative for Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme, scientists say.

Doctors who see patients with unexplained fevers in late spring, summer or fall "need to think about this," Krause said.

Sam R. Telford III, a professor of infectious diseases at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, estimated that 1 to 3 percent of deer ticks in southeastern Massachusetts carry the Borrelia miyamotoi bacterium.

"We have known about this microbe for over a decade," said Telford, who is co-author of another study on Borrelia miyamotoi also appearing in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

Officials from Yale say this is the first time scientists found an infectious disease agent in ticks before seeing it appear in humans.

And scientists say there could be more deer tick-borne diseases on the horizon.

Ticks contain more than 250 bacteria, any one of which could cause disease, microbiologist Stephen Rich of the University of Massachusetts has said.

"They are kind of like a biological cesspool," Larry Dapsis of the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension said.

"It's a little bit scary when you think about this organism that can cause a lot of problems in different ways. The solution is the same - prevention," Dapsis said.

Other types of relapsing fever disease have been known to cause cardiac and neurological complications, Krause said. But those problems were not observed among the Russian and American patients with the new infection that seems to blend symptoms of Lyme and relapsing fever, he said.

"People shouldn't panic about this," Krause said. "We need more research quickly to find out what the true health burden is."